Urbanisation and globalization progress inevitably every day. More and more companies and organizations offer their products over the Internet and offer fewer customer attendants on site. Further the commercial transactions are ever more complicated, with customer loyalty cards, credit cards, and ID cards all being swiped for one purchase of e.g. a sandwich.
On the other hand end customers move more and more each day. A typical sales representative in the EU might be in 5 different countries during a working week. With more mobile customers, and ever reduced investment to serve said customers there is a clear long felt need to develop technologies that would allow the customers to automatically access the services and products of companies or organisations, easily, right at the moment, right at the location, with minimum cost.
To address this need several mobile cellular techniques have been devised to purchase a product for consumption on site, without the customer addressing the service attendant. Perhaps one of the most successful practical technologies is the one developed in Helsinki Finland by Plusdial Oy for accessing public transport tickets. Nearly every tram in Helsinki has a mobile phone number on the wall of the tram, to which the customers can SMS a coded message, and one standard adult ticket will be sent by return SMS with the fee deducted from the phone bill. This system suffers from a major disadvantage in that people need to find and read the instructions from the wall, and the system can issue only one type of ticket: standard one way ticket.
It is also known from WO 2009/022356 that SMS based forms can be used by key value pairs. This document is cited here as reference. This text based method requires a lot of typing from the users within a form limited to 160 characters.
It is also known from publication WO 02/39765 of the inventor, how non-intrusive advertisements or messages could be shown to mobile phone users on the display, for example based on location as the user enters or leaves a cell of the cellular network. This document is cited here as reference. The disadvantage associated with this document is that the fact that the message does not intrude does not mean that the user needs or is interested in the message at all, and it is even less probable that the user is interested in the message at the moment and place of receiving the message.
It is also within the prior art to purchase goods by filling a form on the Internet while accessing it with a mobile phone, which allows for more complex transactions.
It is also known that search engines and any electronic information retrieval (IR) device operate by indexing. Indexing is the process by which a vocabulary of keywords is assigned to all documents of a corpus (=body of documents, such as the Internet or US congress library). Mathematically, an index is a relation mapping each document to the set of keywords that it is about:
      Index    ⁢          :        ⁢                  ⁢          doc      i        ⁢      ->    about    ⁢      {          kw      j        }  
The inverse mapping captures, for each keyword, the documents it describes:
            Index              -        1              ⁢          :        ⁢                  ⁢          {              kw        j            }        ⁢      ->    describes    ⁢      doc    i  
The index relation is the fundamental connection between the user's expressions of information need and the documents that can satisfy them, this simply stated goal—“Build the Index relation”—is at the core of the IR problem and Finding Out About (FOA) generally, [Finding Out About, Richard Belew, cited and quoted here as reference].
These days search engines use web crawler software to pinpoint and pickup keywords from web pages and build the index relation. In doing so, web crawler indexing software will choose rare and relevant words to build the index relation. The fact that “and” is on a webpage is not really interesting because it does not limit the search, whereas “hypothermia” is a very rare word in the world wide web, and would probably be chosen as a keyword. Thus, a prior art search engine will search all keywords, but it will ignore words such as “and”, “to” and many isolated alphanumeric characters such as “10” or “10-7 pm”, because they are extremely frequent in the billions of web pages and essentially do not limit the search at all.
It is also known that Google mobile search and Google Maps for mobile deduces the location of the mobile phone from GPS data, WLAN-based/WIFI based services and Cell transmitter based services in this order of precedence (source: Google Maps—Wikipedia). The location is taken into account so that the user does not need to type his location in Google mobile search. Google Mobile also provides for automatic updating of the background location.
The problem faced by the prior art on the search side is that while location related human language identifiers are unique enough to be picked up as identifiers, such as the address “Fabianinkatu, Helsinki, Finland”, many time-space related information, like the co-ordinates (longitude, latitude):
24.949586391448974,
60.16525494433567
Or “open weekdays 9 am-5 pm”, are not indexed at all, or not quoted by web page owners on their sites.
Consequently when you try to search for a barber that would be open with available reservations as you are walking home from work, on the spot within your current postcode, right now, you end up having to search several web pages in advance that might be good candidates for providing the barber service, and manually inspecting whether they are actually open/closed/available/not available and so on. Walking on the street while staring at the mobile phone screen for search results could get the user driven over by a car, in addition to being distracting and unpleasant to consumers. Mobile Data Roaming is also very expensive in many countries.
Quite clearly what is needed is a dynamically and contextually aware automatic mechanism on the query side while having a dynamically and contextually aware search engine on the reply side to assist the user in passively browsing the information space as he changes location and time goes by, and providing the relevant results thereto, which can be then noticed and re-acted to with minimum effort. This should also be low cost, and not use cellular roaming connections if cheaper ones are available. The invention solves just this problem.